I first heard about the Dark Enlightenment (aka “Neo-Reaction” or just “Reaction”) last year, the year after I graduated from college and was interning at a conservative think tank. I briefly become involved with the Dark Enlightenment and then left the movement in disgust. Here is what I learned:

– The Dark Enlightenment is controlled by what the media call “Sith Lords”. You have more public Lords like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land, but there are even some Lords up higher whose names are not revealed. They say the Master Lord says ‘Et Ego in Arcadia’ which is an anagram for ‘Tego Arcana Dei’ (“I hide the secrets of God”).

– But only the media call them ‘Sith Lords’. In Inner Speak, they will often use phrases like the Men of Númenor or the Eldars.

– I never met any of the higher Eldars, but I did once meet an Eldar in Training. I don’t know his real name but people called him Legolas. He had long blond hair, was dressed like a 19th century count, and wore a pendant that had both a Christian Cross and Thor’s Hammer on it.

– The movement is a weird mixture of ethno-nationalists, futurists, monarchists, PUAs (“pick-up artists” like Chateau Heartiste), Trad Catholics, Trad Protestants, etc. They all believe in HBD (what they call “human biodiversity” i.e. racism) but disagree on some other minor points.

– The religious people in the movement (both Christians and pagans) practice what is called “identitarian religion” (religion that doesn’t deny ethnic identity).

– Some of the rising stars of the Dark Enlightenment on the internet seem to be Radish Magazine, Occam’s Razor Mag, and Theden TV.

– The Dark Enlightenment allegedly has millions of dollars of money to play with. They have a couple big donors. One is rumored to be a major tech tycoon in Silicon Valley. They actually had a private 3-day meeting on an island which was furnished with a French chef, etc. Different forms of formal attire were required for each day (tuxedos, 3-piece suits, etc), and some weird costumes were required too (capes, hoods, etc) — which sound like a pagan cult. (I wasn’t at this function but heard about it.)

– I was initiated into the first stages of the Dark Enlightenment, which involved me stripping down naked so people could “inspect my phenotype”. I was then given a series of very personal questions, often relating to sexual matters. I was then told to put on a black cape. (I really regret doing this but at the time I was younger, more impressionable and eager to please.)

– For the initial oath taking, everyone must swear on a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species, just to show their fidelity to HBD. After that, for the later oaths, seculars will swear again on Darwin, while Christians will swear on the Bible, and pagans on the Prose Edda or Iliad.

– At one of the meetings I heard someone continuously chanting “gens alba conservanda est” (Latin for “the white race must be preserved”) and then others were chanting things in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Old German, but I don’t know those languages so I can’t remember exactly what they were saying.

– They also have all their own secret handshakes, and their own terminology [like the Cathedral ("political correctness"), thedening ("re-establishing ethnic group identity"), genophilia ("love of one’s own race"), NRx ("neoreaction"), etc.].

– On the philosophical level, this movement is not entirely original. Much of it is borrowed from the Identitarian movement in Europe. They also all detest democracy. They are not trying to be a “populist movement” but are only trying to convert other elites to their way of thinking.

This whole movement is like a secret cult, which is why I left. Also, because of the valiant and brave efforts of people on the net exposing this movement, I saw this cult for the evil it truly is. Please stay away from it.

There has to be a typo in there: Radish Magazine is an organic food/healthy living site which almost certainly has no connection to the pasty-pale Hot Pockets-gobbling clientele of the Dark Enlightenment. [I stand corrected: there is also a Dark Enlightenment associated Radish Mag.] I think the writer meant Taki’s Magazine, which with Occam’s Razor Mag and Theden are among the more popular sites for neo-racists. Visit them at your peril — they will fill you with rage.

You might also notice the overlap between the Dark Enlightenment dogma and HBD dogma. They’re all championed by biological ignoramuses who think they understand evolution, but really don’t — and they happily trumpet their bigotry as scientifically justifiable. Here’s one list of the shared beliefs of both HBD and the Dark Enlightenment. Really, it’s just old-fashioned racism of the sort Houston Stewart Chamberlain would have endorsed, right down to their muddled love/hate relationship with science — evolution is only useful if it can be twisted to agree with their preconceptions, while they yearn more for religious justifications, especially the Identitarian religion they want to practice.

Another area of overlap is with the MRA/PUA crowd, as noted above. Lately, the obnoxious kooks who flood my email and twitter accounts with ‘proof’ that I’m an evil feminist have taken to sending me links to places like Taki’s Magazine. Apparently, I’m supposed to see the mad scribblings of John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer as evidence that science shows that I’m wrong about everything. Some of them don’t even seem to be aware of the racist tone of their sources (but I could be wrong), and are cherry-picking from the reactionary right to find just the bits that agree with their views on women.

The Dark Enlightenment, with their contradictory name, are looking pretty dark, at least. It seems to be the fulminating cloaca of the internet, where all kinds of sewage drifts to mingle and react to produce a cloud of noxious fumes. The only responsible thing to do is…flush.

I wondered about the “heads up their asses libertarian types” part, so I cocked through and read some of their blog posts. It’s unmistakable that they quote some libertarian writers, like Hans Hoppe, and use some of the jargon, but I still can’t detect anything coherently libertarian in their thought–probably because I can’t detect any coherent thought whatsoever. It’s fucking word salad. Layers and layers of jargon, as if designed to conceal that ultimately their terms are defined only with more terms, forming a loose sloppy circularity of definition.

Maybe that’s a suitable medium for racist misogynists to coexist, since their ideas are so undefined that they can project what they want onto them and pretend to be in agreement.

– For the initial oath taking, everyone must swear on a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species, just to show their fidelity to HBD

Of course, the Origin of Species is such a sacred book, an oath sworn on that book can not ever be broken, oh no. And the Book is the true source of HBD knowledge. blah blah blah
seriously, what are they oathing? To follow their dogma to the ends of rationality? ~blech~

that typo; maybe they dropped a hyphen: “Radish”, maybe, was “Rad-ish”, “ish” being an operative adjective of the word “rad”, short for “radical”. [all I can think of…]

I am simply in love with the unspoken conceit that all the people pushing for the “Dark Enlightenment” (which was, coincidentally, the title of my Warhammer 40K fanfiction epic when I was 12) will be the ones being treated well by it.

The people behind it are wearing their vicious autocracy on their sleeves, lapels and rolling neon signs which follow them around. Why on Earth would they share power, even assuming their “movement” made even the smallest of steps towards realization?

This seems way too ridiculous, like the sort of thing people dream up about Satanic cults but with less murder. The swearing of oaths on books in particular feels wrong, from a culture that’s supposed to be all about self-determination and how they’re so much better than the sheepish masses.

(To be clear, it’s not that there aren’t people writing extreme neoreactionary BS and applying the term ‘Dark Enlightenment’ to themselves, for example at the “Radish Magazine” located at radishmag.wordpress.com, but rather that the quoted article is a piece of bait aimed, very successfully, at Mark Shea specifically.)

It reads like a parody, Poe’s law. Which means it is plausible enough to be true, even if it isn’t.

What is lacking is the data, numbers. The internet is a poweful kook amplifier. As we’ve seen with various trolls, e.g. DM in Montreal, one person can send hundreds or thousands of comments, emails, and posts in a day, every day.

Racism is common and ubiquitous but I’d be surprised if the HBD version has more than a few hundred people. You don’t need to coat your racism with pseudoscience and most people don’t bother.

Racism is making a huge comeback. It’s the core of the GOP, Fox NoNews, and the Tea Party. It’s no secret why.

1. The US is on trend to go majority nonwhite in 2043. Four states already are including Texas and California, the two largest in population.

Whites are afraid that the nonwhites will do to them, what they did to the nonwhites. This isn’t a guess BTW, it is the result of mainstream opinion polling.

2. The median declining standard of living. Economic inequality has been increasing since 1970.

As the pie shrinks, fear goes up and fights break out over pieces of it.

The Dark Enlightenment isn’t a cause, it is a symptom.

PS Now that the fundie xian’s main hate target, the gay hate is winding down, they will have to resurrect some of their old ones. It’s probably going to be xenophobia, racism, misogyny, anti-immigration, and anti-No Religions.

We might have seen that in Virginia. Cantor was Jewish in a heavily fundie xian district and insufficiently rabidly xenophobic.

@raven #22
I think your analysis is spot on. Part of the connection is that as inequality rises, the elites tend to historically prefer a “divide and conquer” strategy against everyone else and tend to reach to their old favorites: race and religion as tools to subdivide the lumpen.

This seems way too ridiculous, like the sort of thing people dream up about Satanic cults but with less murder.

Maybe, but rituals really are something special.

In the light of day, you read about grand wizards wearing pillowcase hats, spirits of ancient aliens executed by the galactic lord, or the descendants of Númenor asking for oaths on a science book and it sounds too stupid for words. So much like bad fiction that even sympathizers should be laughing.

But somehow you make people go through a couple of stages to get there, put them in as otherworldly a ceremony as you can manage, and it seems a lot of people will find it compelling.

I kept seeing the Occam’s Razor Mag posting links to it’s website in regards to Wade’s Book in the comments of several blog post critical of Wade’s book. I had never heard of it before, so I went there. I didn’t stay long because I didn’t want to torture my computer with a racist website.

They’re using the name “Occam’s Razor” in an ironic way (whether they know it or not) like giving the nickname “Stretch” to a short person.

Steve Sailer was also all over the comments. At one point Jennifer Raff asked him to answer the questions that commenters had asked him before posting another comment. Again, I went to his website and just looked at the titles to his blog post. That was enough to realize that he was a racist.

I must be lucky – or maybe it’s because I live in Portland – but all the people I play D&D with are lefty social worker nerds like myself. Same with the majority of the Comic-Con and gaming convention crowds. Once in awhile I do meet a right wing neo-Heathen gamer who is racist and clearly delusional, but not too often. I don’t see the D&D connection as being that strong.

No, I don’t think so. There are elements of the story that I suspect of being quirky or made up (like the naked hazing bit), but all you have to do is read any of the Dark Enlightenment blogs to see the gist of the story confirmed.

I don’t believe a word of it. And I can’t understand how any thinking person could take an “expose” of this sort published on a christian blog seriously.

I’ve see these before, specifically used by Jack Chick and Berit Kjos. It fits the pattern
-Published on a christian website.
-Written by an “escapee”. Sometimes from satanism, sometimes from witchcraft. Sometimes it’s a ‘High Priest’.
-Full of paranoid gobbledegook describing strange-sounding secret rituals, costumes, slogans, terminology, jargon and nicknames.
-Attacking whatever the fundies are up in arms against at the moment, like D&D.
-Associating Darwin with racism.

Yeah I’ve see it before. “Peter” of the “Hermetic Golden Dawn”, High Priestess Rebecca Brown, “Father Alberto Rivera” and now this.

Though also the season 3 episode with the “band candy” fundraising drive where the kids are selling magic chocolate bars as a distraction ploy (and we first hear Giles called “Ripper”), let’s see, Go Ogle, Go!: Oh, hell, it’s called Band Candy. I should have known that.

Though I suppose the sewer scene in that one isn’t as elaborately ritualized, is it? I guess you’re right. Reptile Boy.

Now that Nerd Culture is basically the (pop-)cultural mainstream, I suppose it was only a matter of time before it got co-opted by the usual reactionary nutters.

At least so far I haven’t heard anything about these people outside of this blog. Maybe they’ll bicker themselves to pieces and diffuse back into other reactionary groups that at least don’t title their leaders after fucking Warhammer/Lord of the Rings characters. Right now they’re a good candidate for Most Embarrassing American Subculture next to Juggalos and Libertarians.

I’m sorry, but the part about a bunch of folk holding some kind of secret meetings, complete with a weird initiation ceremony, and trying to be some super-secret organisation is believable, if somewhat absurd, but I really can’t take the top part seriously.

First there’s the reference to ‘Et Ego in Arcadia’, which a quick Google refreshes my memory and reminds me that it is actually probably a mistyped version of the phrase ‘Et in Arcadia ego’, which is the title of a painting by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri and two paintings by Nicolas Poussin, and actually means something like ‘Even in Arcadia, there am I’, and probably refers to the idea of death existing everywhere, even in idyllic paradises. The idea it was an anagram came from a book called ‘The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail’, much of which has been torn apart by multiple people, multiple times, and whose writers had the incorrect idea that ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ wasn’t a grammatically correct phrase in Latin.

Then we move on to the ‘Sith Lords’, as the media apparently calls them. No, that’s far too silly, they would never call themselves people from Star Wars – instead, they call themselves people from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, or possibly a race from Warhammer 40,000, one of whom gets called by the name of a character from Lord of the Rings.

That they are all a bunch of racists, using this ‘human biodiversity’ nonsense as a paper-thin justification for it is not sufficiently unusual, unfortunately, to cast doubt upon it, and that they swear on Darwin’s ‘Origin’ is borderline believable, but only if the people have never bothered to actually read it, nor ‘Descent’. Those two books make it completely clear that, when talking about humans, there is only one ‘race’, according to Darwin, and he uses that word as a synonym for ‘species’. The only thing that gives me pause here is the idea that pagans swear on the Iliad. As far as I am aware, there is nothing about the Iliad that makes it particularly holy or sacred amongst pagans, but, then again, there’s many kinds of paganism I know very little or nothing about.

PZ, as abhorrent as the HBD guys are, I’m surprised at your credulity for accepting at face value such a feverish narrative published anonymously on a Catholic blog. How is this any different than the lurid tales of “inside looks” into satanic cults and their human sacrifices. In a different age, we’d hear church people tell these same types of tales about cults of Jews or Masons or natural philosophers.

These tales are designed to drum up the worst fears of religious followers. Hidden initiations into well-funded, esoteric hierarchies; lavish secret meetings of movement elders on islands; odd-looking people in hooded robes chanting in Latin and other ancient languages. Of course this would upset Catholics: they should be the only ones who get to do those things.

The HBDs provide enough damning evidence through their own first-person statements; we don’t need to rely on second- and third-hand, anonymous, melodrama to take them down.

You have a point, but by the same token, we know that Freemasons, for one, actually do go in for daft costumes and ceremonies, as do the Ku Klux Klan and American college fraternities – such things have an attraction for many people, who like to feel they are part of a secret elite holding esoteric knowledge. So I don’t think the lurid features of the story tell one way or the other.

And I can’t understand how any thinking person could take an “expose” of this sort published on a christian blog seriously.

Which aspects are untrue?

Almost certainly every single damn word!!!

I didn’t catch that it was from a xian blog. They lie about everything. For the fundies, lying is one of their 3 main sacraments. No lies = No fundie xianity.

Yeah, this fits in with another one of their staple lies. Satanism. There is a whole minor industry in fundieland of ex-satanists running around the church circuit claiming to be escapees from satanic cults.

Whenever anyone has looked, and they have looked hard, it is either unconfirmable or confirmed that they just made it all up. There was one guy from Socal who made millions doing this until people started investigating. There was so much proof he just made it up, even the xians stopped believing him.

Obama is a Kenyan born, Moslem terrorist, the Illuminati control the world. UN Agenda 21, global warming is a hoax, George Bush has a brain, 9/11 was an inside job, satanists kidnap a million children on Halloween and kill them (John Hagee actually said this on TV) and on and on.

I knew nothing about these DE guys until this post, but I agree that, while they may be every bit as reprehensible as is implied in the OP, I will need outside confirmation of most of that “confession” before I believe it. It is built almost exactly like the “confession” of Mike Warnke, who wrote and lectured about his time as a high priest in a satanist cult, from which the blood of Jesus saved him. He made quite a bit of money doing this because people wanted to believe it. The DE people seem to be pretty damned despicable, but that story doesn’t sound real to me.

I was not “accepting at face value” that weird confession — notice that I do not give a damn about the nonsense about secret handshakes and secret rituals. I talked about the core beliefs of the Dark Enlightenment assholes, which I confirmed by reading the actual words of open advocates of the Dark Enlightenment — you know, all that stuff I linked to in the post. Read that.

Don’t believe me? Go read Mencius Moldbug (if you can; my god, the man makes Dan Fincke seem terse) or Nick Land. Go right to the source. You’ll find that all the scientific racism and neo-fascism and looney tunes philosophy is bare naked and exposed, and that they’re even proud of it.

I must be lucky – or maybe it’s because I live in Portland – but all the people I play D&D with are lefty social worker nerds like myself. Same with the majority of the Comic-Con and gaming convention crowds.

I don’t think you’re lucky. I think the vast majority of the nerd subculture leans well to the left, as do Silicon Valley types. The crazy reactionaries are drawing outsized attention simply because they’re so far off the norm. And because they’re crazy.

It is built almost exactly like the “confession” of Mike Warnke, who wrote and lectured about his time as a high priest in a satanist cult, from which the blood of Jesus saved him.

Otrame remembered the name. So many fundie liars and money vacuuming conpeople, it is hard to remember them all. It would be far more unusual to find one who was halfway honest.

Mike Warnke wikipedia:

The Satan Seller[edit]

In 1973, Warnke’s book The Satan Seller was released. Written by Warnke, with help from Balsiger and Les Jones, the book tells of Warnke being orphaned as a child and his introduction into Satanism. Further detailed is Warnke’s participation in sexual orgies, alcoholism, and drug dealing; his rise in the ranks of Satanism to the level of “high priest”; presiding over Satanic rituals including magical spells, summoning demons, ritual sex including a ritual kidnap and rape; the attempt on his life — a heroin overdose — that left him angry and disillusioned; his heroism in Vietnam; and how he found Jesus and came home as an evangelist. The story ends with Warnke living happily in California with wife Sue Studer. In fewer than three months after the release, The Satan Seller had become a religious best-seller.[1]

The book launched Warnke into stardom within evangelical Christian communities.

Warnke became a rich superstar in fundieland with his bestseller, The Satan Seller. It was all a pack of lies and even the xians stopped believing it.

BTW, Warnke is still around running a con somewhere. It doesn’t matter what these guys do, they never go away. Warnke is around, Jim Bakker is riding high after his little prison interlude, Kent Hovind will be back. I suppose Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld will be made saints before too long, right up there with Reagan.

I think the vast majority of the nerd subculture leans well to the left, as do Silicon Valley types

In the latter case at least, I think they lean aggressively corporate center-left rather than left per se. Silicon Valley, after all, is the epicenter of the “my MBA and/or billion-dollar tech company mean I must understand education policy better than anyone who has ever taught or studied the learning process” attitude behind so many charter schools. Replacing public schools with an even-more-segregated, even-more-hierarchy-producing for-profit system that tracks kids into eventual social class by the time they turn 10 isn’t exactly a leftist idea.

Indeed not. The fascist hero acts. He doesn’t waste time thinking, he acts for the sake of acting.

Maybe fascism was the tragedy and neoreaction is the farce.

There are elements of the story that I suspect of being quirky or made up (like the naked hazing bit)

Why? That would go quite a way towards ensuring that all members can be blackmailed. It makes perfect sense for this kind of organization.

I don’t know of any measure of biodiversity below the species level.

The Phylogenetic Diversity Index is independent of all levels – but it requires clades, which are a rather fuzzy affair among extant humans.

The only thing that gives me pause here is the idea that pagans swear on the Iliad. As far as I am aware, there is nothing about the Iliad that makes it particularly holy or sacred amongst pagans, but, then again, there’s many kinds of paganism I know very little or nothing about.

While I doubt that there are enough Hellenic neopagans in the US to make this worthwhile, perhaps the Iliad is attractive in that all its protagonists are nobles.

(Of course, it all goes to shit, and the Odyssee has cattle herders and pig herders among its very heroes while the bulk of noblemen is portrayed as a heap of assholes.)

These tales are designed to drum up the worst fears of religious followers. Hidden initiations into well-funded, esoteric hierarchies; lavish secret meetings of movement elders on islands; odd-looking people in hooded robes chanting in Latin and other ancient languages. Of course this would upset Catholics: they should be the only ones who get to do those things.

While I really love the last sentence of this, “well-funded” in the second sentence isn’t wrong either. Follow the link in comment 10 and read that article to its bitter end.

The problem with racialism is that asserting there are no minor to moderate differences among populations that have, in some cases diverged 100,000 years ago is patently absurd.

Anyone following the manosphere as closely as I have the past year is bound to run across this peculiar pocket. I find the whole phenomenon of romanticizing the Dark Ages baffling for anyone over the age of twelve. But then again, I had already come of age when kids started getting lost in sewers while playing D & D, so I wasn’t weaned on these fantasy worlds. It’s somewhat alarming there is some real money behind it, though.

Worth nothing that say, lactase persistence spread through most of Eurasia in cca 8,000 years. And that the paleolithic hunters of Europe cca 15,000 years ago apparently had black skin and blue eyes, a combination which doesn’t occur anymore.

Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews diverged only cca 2,000 years ago at most, yet one population has somehow gained a standard deviation in verbal IQ which gives them a leg up vs everyone else in almost everything. (and some crippling neurological ailments)

I don’t know, it doesn’t directly interest me, but spread out the shower curtains, add a few gallons of Wesson, a large bag of MDMA, and some techno music and they could work out their inner demons and emerge the next morning renewed as human beings … but unable to look each other in the eye.

Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews diverged only cca 2,000 years ago at most, yet one population has somehow gained a standard deviation in verbal IQ which gives them a leg up vs everyone else in almost everything.

It’s 1:45 am, I’m too tired to deal with this now beyond saying that the IQ test measures the ability to pass the IQ test and probably nothing else… “Diverge” is also not the best term when applied to people who share so much of the geographical variation of the people around them.

I’m not quite sure what Alex Coemer is trying to argue either, but I am glad that David M commented on the wrongness.

Just to make it very clear to Alex, there is only one extant species of humans. Genetic variation within the species accounts for a gradient of skin and eye tones from melanistic to nearly albino

This is similar to the fact that all breeds of dogs from Great Danes to Chihauhaus are one species.

Worth nothing that say, lactase persistence spread through most of Eurasia in cca 8,000 years.

Why is this worth noting? It’s just a genetic mutation that was strongly selected for in populations that had domesticated cattle. Aurochs weren’t native to Africa, so it is not at all surprising that their native range strongly correlates with the human populations that have the ability to digest lactase beyond early childhood.

And that the paleolithic hunters of Europe cca 15,000 years ago apparently had black skin and blue eyes, a combination which doesn’t occur anymore.

I read all your links, there was nothing in them that supports this particular factoid.

Behold the gorgeous example of black skin and blue eyes that is Michael Ealy

I know this may not be directly related to the topic, but THIS is the type of weird loser shit I associate with the obsessive “Dungeons & Dragons”-fantasy-type crowds.

People who join groups like the Klan, with their dumbass pre-school masturbatory titles like “Grand Dragon”, or who adopt vampiresque capes and old languages and other cult junk reeking of that New Agey muddled romanticization of Transylvania, gothicism, various European cultures’ ancient mythologies and so on, threaten to make my eyes roll permanently.

It is sooooooooooooooooooo pretentious! And weird! I’m like, why are you so weird??

Generally speaking mutts tend to be healthier and more adaptable. A study of stray dogs that survive around most human habitations without direct human assistance shows that the ones that tend to survive long term all have similar physical characteristics: Short hair, mix-breeds, of medium size.

Humans have developed a moderate biological preference to breed with humans of differing biology. Part of this manifests as scent preference for mates outside their direct family. This is thought to lower the prevalence of in-breeding and the issues of genetic narrowness where an entire population is susceptible to a single disease agent. the bottom line is that populations are generally healthier with a wider genetic base and genetically diverse population.

I cant tell if razzlefrog is being sarcastic or is just one of those annoying, tedious, and ignorant assholes who think they are better than those awful weirdos who hang out with their friends and tell stories using imagination and dice. The nerve of having fun, socializing, and exercising your creativity with others to tell stories of heroes and villians in a land of fantasy.

Hate to break it to you, but the neoreactionaries (or dark enlightenment types as this puts it) are really a thing. It’s not made up. Quite a few of them are very powerful and rich people. Ed Thiel, the man who bankrolled the cult of “LessWrong” is also one of them as well as the founders of Skype. I go to school with a bunch of these people as well as people who have done “internships” at MIRI.

“Humans have developed a moderate biological preference to breed with humans of differing biology. ”

But according to you and this website, “biology” does not differ between people.

“This is similar to the fact that all breeds of dogs from Great Danes to Chihauhaus are one species”

And since all dogs are the same species, there can be no substantial differences between dogs? But clearly there are substantial differences between dogs, and it’s obvious to anyone that these differences are genetic.

And since all dogs are the same species, there can be no substantial differences between dogs? But clearly there are substantial differences between dogs, and it’s obvious to anyone that these differences are genetic.

Citation need as to the real genetic differences with dogs. Trying to a little real science and look up your facts.

Oh, silly me. Lewontin is right, again! More variation between dog breeds than within them, so therefore dog breeds don’t exist! Sorry about my ignorance. I’m off to the pet store to buy a Chihuahua to guard my house.

Let me just get this straight: the differences between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are wholly environmental? Is that your argument?

You must be stupid. I expect you to look up and find out exactly how much genetic difference, and where, there is. I suspect not much, just in a few developmental regulatory genes. You don’t do science just by looking at the superficial. You go deeper. That is where the racists fail, when a deeper look into the genome occurs. You can’t define race from the genome.

No, because you have no metric for measuring stupid. There is no metric for measuring stupid, stupid!

“I expect you to look up and find out exactly how much genetic difference, and where, there is. I suspect not much, just in a few developmental regulatory genes”

So small differences in genotype give rise to significant differences in phenotype. That sounds a lot like Wade:

“Exploration of the genome has shown that all humans, whatever their race, share the same set of genes. Each gene exists in a variety of alternative forms known as alleles, so one might suppose that races have distinguishing alleles, but even this is not the case. A few alleles have highly skewed distributions but these do not suffice to explain the difference between races. The difference between races seems to rest on the subtle matter of relative allele frequencies. The overwhelming verdict of the genome is to declare the basic unity of humankind.”

” You don’t do science just by looking at the superficial. You go deeper. That is where the racists fail, when a deeper look into the genome occurs. You can’t define race from the genome.”

Yes, they are effective! (for certain definitions of “guard”). They certainly guard, ‘vocally’, vociferously. But they are not ‘vicious’ guards. If you want an _alarm_ as a guard, Chihuahuas qualify superbly. If you want a guard that can pin the intruder to the floor and bloody him, Chihuahuas not so qualified. What was your point again?
Dissing Chihuahuas as not being so bloody and vicious? Is that all a guard dog is to you? Dogs are more than just a vicious bodyguard or squirrel catcher or cat chaser. No one was saying every dog is exactly the same, WE have carefully selected certain pairs of dogs to emphasize particular traits, then classified them into separate breeds, but they all still dogs.

No, because you have no metric for measuring stupid. There is no metric for measuring stupid, stupid!

Yes there is. Your stupid words and ideas.

No, because you have no metric for measuring stupid. There is no metric for measuring stupid, stupid!

Again, YOU show the difference and why it is meaningful to any discussion. Or stupid.

But not all the way to Sub Saharran Africa?

Some South Africans are Caucasians. Immigrants, of course. Again, what differences are meaningful. Until you provide evidence, your claims are dismissed as fuckwittery.

Right. But we’re talking about average differences, which tend to differ significantly between two populations.

How big a difference? 0.5% is the number I have consistently heard for the whole human genome. And YOU have to show the differences are meaningful, not just superficial.
Meaningful evidence from you to date: ZERO.

@David Marjanovic
It’s 1:45 am, I’m too tired to deal with this now beyond saying that the IQ test measures the ability to pass the IQ test and probably nothing else… “Diverge” is also not the best term when applied to people who share so much of the geographical variation of the people around them.

So, why then do Ashkenazi Jews make up something like a third of science Nobelists, and Sephardic Jews lag far behind? Despite there being no great disparity in numbers.

If Ashkenazi Jews were only as intelligent as the populations with whom they’ve lived for centuries, their achievments would not have been so outstanding.

Given that writing has been unnecessary for most people ever, and was developed a grand total of 3 to maybe 5 independent times ever, I can’t refute the null hypothesis.

Umm.. what about you know.. civilization? Preservation of knowledge? Mathematics? Everything else that makes up the difference between civilized people and a bunch of perpetually warring nomadic herders and cattle thieves, of whom 30% eventually die because someone bashes in their head?

Seems to me writing is quite important. Why else would have medieval west-Africans have developed proto-writing by the early middle ages?

@lorn

Humans have developed a moderate biological preference to breed with humans of differing biology. Part of this manifests as scent preference for mates outside their direct family. This is thought to lower the prevalence of in-breeding and the issues of genetic narrowness where an entire population is susceptible to a single disease agent. the bottom line is that populations are generally healthier with a wider genetic base and genetically diverse population.

Oh I get it Max. You’re noting that different breeds of dogs were bred for different roles, and it would be wrong to take one breed for the role it was not bred for. Chihuahuas were bred to be small, while Great Danes were bred to guard, being big and all. So that was your point, right? But to extrapolate from your other racistic screeds, you’re implying that different races have bred themselves into different roles? Such as sub-saharans bred to be long-distance runners, intelligence not required?
As in:

Right. But we’re talking about average differences, which tend to differ significantly between two populations.

Depending on your composition of those 2 populations. Put all the stupid in one and all the smarts in the second, and you’d be correct. But what about a truly random selection of one skin color vs another skin color; I don’t think you’d be correct. How about Hair color, or eye color, or BMI, or nationality, or continent, what-have-you. A random selection from any pair of populations is most likely indistinguishable. Show me I’m wrong.

let me flail a little at some common ignorance’ Dog breeds are the result of selective inbreeding for generations ,producing very interesting characteristics often with some severe genetic problems . While most humans are not the result of inbreeding. As for wining a Nobel prize that would first require an education in an appropriate field and a culture that supports the research that the success would require. There is no evidence I am aware of that says that that level of intelligence is restricted to or favored by any ethnic grouping if the main requirements of education and support are supplied similar success follows

I have to disagree some what with the ideas about Chihuahuas. Some the most aggressive and bad tempered dogs I have ever met were Chihuahuas.
If your idea of a watch dog is big and intimidating like a 110 lb Rottweiler you would be right a single 110lb dog is pretty dam scarey. If want really terrifying look at a 110 lb pack of the little dogs coming at you , 20 little mouths bent on your destruction is not a frivolous thing.
uncle frogy

The Flynn effect is the substantial increase in average scores on intelligence tests all over the world. When IQ tests are initially standardized using a standardization sample the average result is set to 100. By convention, the standard deviation of the results is set to 15 points. When IQ tests are revised they are again standardized using a new standardization sample and the average result set to 100. However, if the new sample is tested using older tests in almost every case they score substantially above 100.The effect has been observed in most parts of the world at different rates. The Flynn effect is named for James R. Flynn, who did much to document it and promote awareness of its implications. The term itself was coined by the authors of The Bell Curve.[1] Rushton has argued that the effect should be called the “Lynn-Flynn effect”, after Richard Lynn, “because it was actually the Lynn (1982) article in Nature that first identified the trend in recent times (among the Japanese).”[2] Similar improvements have been reported for other cognitions such as semantic and episodic memory.[3]

The effect’s increase has been continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to the present. There are numerous proposed explanations of the Flynn effect and also some skepticism about its implications. The Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations, possibly allowing the national differences in IQ scores to diminish if the Flynn effects continues in nations with lower average national IQs.

Moreover, IQ, barring extreme cases, is a decent predictor of success in life.

From your link:

Our analysis shows that the early measured IQ is a relatively good predictor of life success in terms of objective indicators. However, we were not able to separate the effect of IQ from its environmental correlates. Moreover, the IQ measures from the early period and from adulthood do not explain subjectively understood life success. On the basis of the 1999 panel study, we point out that the correlation between intelligence measured at ages thirteen and thirty-six is moderate. Taking these results into account, we conclude that the importance of the role of IQ in predicting life success should not be overestimated.

Are you sure you’re not overestimating the importance of the role of IQ in predicting life success?

For more than a century our intelligence quotient (IQ) has been used to measure how clever people are and Mensa, the society for the intellectual elite, has even used the test to weed out sub-par applicants.
But now the scale has been dismissed as a “myth” by scientists who found that our intelligence can only be predicted by combining results from at least three tests of our mental agility.
Different circuits within the brain are used for different thought processes, the researchers showed, meaning separate tests of short-term memory, reasoning and verbal skills are needed to measure someone’s overall intelligence.
Their landmark study was based on the results of an online intelligence test which was launched by the Daily Telegraph and New Scientist two years ago, and attracted more than 110,000 responses.
Dr Roger Highfield, the Telegraph columnist and one of the authors of the paper, said: “When you come to the most complex known object, the human brain, the idea that there is only one measure of intelligence had to be wrong.

Either you haven’t managed to read the second half of the abstract, or you’re just trolling! Check out the quote in comment 90.

It’s all on the first page. It even says that IQ is nowhere near constant throughout life – “the correlation between intelligence measured at ages thirteen and thirty-six is moderate” – and yet you pretend IQ is a single innate number!

Assuming “general mental ability” is IQ or more than moderately correlated to IQ, the abstract of that paper says what you want it to say. I’ll see tomorrow if I have access to the rest of the paper; the abstract is very short, especially for an 11-page paper.

Given that writing has been unnecessary for most people ever, and was developed a grand total of 3 to maybe 5 independent times ever, I can’t refute the null hypothesis.

Umm.. what about you know.. civilization? Preservation of knowledge? Mathematics? Everything else that makes up the difference between civilized people and a bunch of perpetually warring nomadic herders and cattle thieves, of whom 30% eventually die because someone bashes in their head?

Wow. Have you really never heard of slash-and-burn agriculture, of horticulture as found in the highlands of New Guinea, or of hunter-fucking-gatherers!?!

Seems to me writing is quite important. Why else would have medieval west-Africans have developed proto-writing by the early middle ages?

Those people have very dark skin, so I don’t quite see why you bring it up… I didn’t know about their proto-writing, though, so I’d appreciate details in any case. :-) I’ll just say you’re talking about complex societies with complex economies that have indulged in trade across the Sahara since much earlier than the Middle Ages, not representative of most people in the history of the world. People who don’t need writing don’t invent it – or if some nerd does, the invention doesn’t spread.

David M I think one of things that seems to be implied is that those societies/ cultures who are hunters-gatherers or practice farming as in New Guinea those that are deemed as “primitive” are not as intelligent or sophisticated as the civilized ones. Thinking that completely leaves out the actual history that has occurred
I think that not taking into account the actual history of humanity is at the very root of their errors that and delusions of grandeur that are matched only by their resentment all lead to a story that hangs together but fails to match the observed reality it is supposed to be making a statements about.

The only thing that gives me pause here is the idea that pagans swear on the Iliad. As far as I am aware, there is nothing about the Iliad that makes it particularly holy or sacred amongst pagans, but, then again, there’s many kinds of paganism I know very little or nothing about.

I wonder if they meant the Aeneid. It has a lot more of the “lineage destiny” kind of rhetoric in it.

“However, the biggest surprise was to discover that this individual possessed African versions in the genes that determine the light pigmentation of the current Europeans, which indicates that he had dark skin, although we can not know the exact shade.”

____________________________

@88 Nick Gotts

Look up “Flynn effect”. Its existence makes it absolutely clear that IQ scores cannot be used to determine innate differences between populations.

The Flynn effect means no such thing. It can be used to distinguish between populations sharing the same basic environment. And it’s been established, in the Netherlands for example, that while it has slowed for the native population, not for children of immigrants.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#IQ_group_differences)

______________________________________

@90 Tony

Are you sure you’re not overestimating the importance of the role of IQ in predicting life success?

I dare you find one science nobelist with a low-IQ. They’re probably all well over 130.
Anyway, women are less likely to win science Nobels, Fields medals and similar prizes because the variation of female IQs is lower – there are relatively fewer very stupid women and fewer very smart women than there are very stupid men or very smart men.

From wiki..

Some studies have identified the degree of IQ variance as a difference between males and females. Males tend to show greater variability on many traits including tests of cognitive abilities,[77][78] though this may differ between countries.[79][80][81] A 2005 study by Ian Deary, Paul Irwing, Geoff Der, and Timothy Bates, focusing on the ASVAB showed a significantly higher variance in male scores, resulting in more than twice as many men as women scoring in the top 2%. The study also found a very small (d’ ≈ 0.07, less than 7%, of a standard deviation) average male advantage in g.[62] A 2006 study by Rosalind Arden and Robert Plomin focused on children aged 2, 3, 4, 7, 9 and 10 and stated that there was greater variance “among boys at every age except age two despite the girls’ mean advantage from ages two to seven. Girls are significantly over-represented, as measured by chi-square tests, at the high tail and boys at the low tail at ages 2, 3 and 4. By age 10 the boys have a higher mean, greater variance and are over-represented in the high tail.

Don’t worry though. With the coming age of genetic engineering, that is going to be easily fixable. Same as say, the disparity in physical size and strength. IIRC, gender dimorphism in humans has decreased over time, so it’d only make sense to reduce it to zero, as is common in monogamous species, something we aspire to.

Anyway, women are less likely to win science Nobels, Fields medals and similar prizes because the variation of female IQs is lower – there are relatively fewer very stupid women and fewer very smart women than there are very stupid men or very smart men.

That was pretty clear in comment 59, where he brought it up: “Big differences can appear quite rapidly” – meaning, apparently, that whole races can differentiate in just a few thousand years, so Alex can just look the other way when we mention that no human population (except probably the aboriginal Tasmanians) has been isolated for longer than a few hundred years.

My! You’ve been having fun crocheting yourself a whole family of strawmen!

There is no significant correlation between having a high IO score and getting a Nobel so why are you suggesting there might be a correlation with a low one? This sounds to me like a contrarian’s argument – don’t worry whether it’s logical as long as it disagrees with someone, anyone.

Like many here I believe that your score on an IQ tests proves just one thing – how well you did on that test. There is a long, long history, right back to M. Binet, of IQ tests being used to “confirm” racial and political assumptions already made, another reason to avoid reliance on them.

If you suggest that a two or three digit figure, the result of a test taken once, proves something about the inherent ability of the person then I’m not sure why you gave me that wiki extract rather than a proper link to a paper because it would tend to cast doubt on that, even as it stands.

If, Alex, you really and truly believe that an IQ predicts something then how does 147 grab you? That’s mine and I flunked out of university. Ergo, it proves nothing: it is just a number.

Gee, one can expect a new breed of dog to appear on fast time scale, but 50 year minimum would seem reasonable. Which given dog years, is about 12-20 generations, bare minimum for change. Given the human life span, and delayed fertility of women, fifty years would be like three generations. No time for any evolution. Where the bigots get their time from, I can’t comprehend.

And with humans doing animal breeding technics on dogs, it is a very harsh “selection”, where genetic drift, which is much, much slower, would be most likely for any human changes. The bigots don’t understand evolution.

And, of course, they must believe in evo-psych, where everything/attitude is an adaptation. But is a cultural or genetic “adaptation”. Given the plasticity of the human brain, I suspect it is mostly cultural….

I dare you find one science nobelist with a low-IQ. They’re probably all well over 130.
Anyway, women are less likely to win science Nobels, Fields medals and similar prizes because the variation of female IQs is lower – there are relatively fewer very stupid women and fewer very smart women than there are very stupid men or very smart men.

My, my. Well, Alex, my IQ is in the 150s and I’m definitely female. You know what that means? Not. One. Godsdamn. Thing. I performed well on tests. A lot of people perform well on tests, doesn’t mean they can think their way out of a paper bag.

As for those very smart people, you certainly aren’t coming across as one.

My, my. Well, Alex, my IQ is in the 150s and I’m definitely female. You know what that means? Not. One. Godsdamn. Thing. I performed well on tests. A lot of people perform well on tests, doesn’t mean they can think their way out of a paper bag.

As for those very smart people, you certainly aren’t coming across as one.

I think Alex only knows IQ as a buzzword from the bigot community. No idea of what it means, how it is measured, and how allegedly smart people can be bigots too….except they aren’t that smart. If they were, they wouldn’t be bigots. The evidence is that conclusive….

I was unable to blockquote for quite a while after I first started commenting here (despite the “instructions” beneath the comment box which also fails to tell you how to close a tag) until someone explained it to me. I had no experience using HTML character codes, so I was completely ignorant. I suspect the same is true of other commenters, and I really wish FtB would include explicit instructions on how to use the approved HTML tags and attributes.

Certainly IQ test results have been used by racists, but they aren’t the only ones. It’s fairly common in the US to think IQ tests measure your intelligence. It’s possible to latch onto that without having encountered any of the bigots who misuse IQ results in support of racism or sexism.

Certainly IQ test results have been used by racists, but they aren’t the only ones. It’s fairly common in the US to think IQ tests measure your intelligence. It’s possible to latch onto that without having encountered any of the bigots who misuse IQ results in support of racism or sexism.

From what I’ve heard from clinicians, lower scores do have significance other things held constant. (English proficicney for example… which in the past was abused to label certain immigrant groups as stupid.) But other than the really low end, it’s utterly useless.

Tony, I do understand the difference in parts of intelligence. I almost aced the math and chemistry SAT tests 45 years ago, but my language skills were considered normal for college bound folks. One test to measure for all the reasoning required for functioning in the real world? I don’t think so.

A new IQ idolising racist “HBD” chew toy. It would be nice to get one that actually knew a bit of world history for once, but…

As for the list in the OP: it does seems pretty clear the supposed exposé has been embellished, like the endless stories Evangelical Christians like to tell about being ex-atheists who used to worship Satan. I can certainly imagine some of it actually being true (or at least what they tell the new recruits), though.

“Oh I get it Max. You’re noting that different breeds of dogs were bred for different roles, and it would be wrong to take one breed for the role it was not bred for. Chihuahuas were bred to be small, while Great Danes were bred to guard, being big and all. So that was your point, right? But to extrapolate from your other racistic screeds, you’re implying that different races have bred themselves into different roles? Such as sub-saharans bred to be long-distance runners, intelligence not required?”

No, that is not what I am implying.

You and your friends here think that the fact that there is more variation within a race than between is a sufficient condition for biological uniformity . But when I point out that the same is true of dogs, then it becomes clear that that factoid is not a sufficient condition for biological uniformity.

“Depending on your composition of those 2 populations. Put all the stupid in one and all the smarts in the second, and you’d be correct. But what about a truly random selection of one skin color vs another skin color; I don’t think you’d be correct. How about Hair color, or eye color, or BMI, or nationality, or continent, what-have-you. A random selection from any pair of populations is most likely indistinguishable. Show me I’m wrong.”

So what your’re saying is that Northern Europeans are not taller than Southern Europeans? Oh, ok….

“Some South Africans are Caucasians. Immigrants, of course. Again, what differences are meaningful. Until you provide evidence, your claims are dismissed as fuckwittery.”

There are lots of differences. Take altitude adaption in Tibetans; or take the different kinds of ear wax that are produced in different populations; or take lactose tolerance; or take height; or take skull size; or take skull shape; or take eye lids; or take noses; or take skin colour; etc.

“How big a difference? 0.5% is the number I have consistently heard for the whole human genome. And YOU have to show the differences are meaningful, not just superficial.
Meaningful evidence from you to date: ZERO.”

When I refer to a trait, i am obviously referring to that trait, not the whole genome. Take the 1.1 SD difference between black and white Americans on IQ. Or take the height gap that exists between northern and southern Eruopeans — and we know this is genetic, perhaps even due to selection!

You prove that the IQ difference between ‘black’ and ‘white’ americans is not due to differences in culture, economic opportunities, and educational opportunities all stemming from a long period of systematic oppression of coloured people.

Just as a 1.1. SD difference in IQ between Black and white Americans is fucking enormous. We would need to see several pieces of recent, high-quality work to even begin contemplating that idea, especially as the overwhelming majority of USAians are, from the DNA if not visibly, mixed race.

All previously announced “huge differences” in IQ have been almost entirely accounted for by differences in education or opportunity and by stereotype threat in later, more considered work. Sometimes even by the design and lack of adequate verification of the test paper itself.

Draw the diagram, Max. Show us the two distinct peaks in the two different Gaussian curves. Then tell me the difference is genetic when maybe 80% of the test subjects in each category are mixed race. I think you borrowed that notion from bigot without understanding what it might mean.

Gosh, a reference! I guess that settles it. But let’s compare what Max says with what the summary of the Rurchin et al. Nature Genetics paper says:

Max:

Or take the height gap that exists between northern and southern Eruopeans — and we know this is genetic

Turchin et al.:

We observed genetic differences using multiple populations from across Europe, thereby showing that the adult height differences across populations of European descent are not due entirely to environmental differences but rather are, at least partly, genetic differences arising from selection.

No quitesaying the same thing, are they?

Of course it’s quite possible that differences in height between northern and southern Europeans are in part genetic – although it would be a fool who concluded that this was settled science on the basis of the summary of a single paper, even in Nature Genetics. It’s possible there are innate cognitive differences between human population groups. But when we know that the measured IQ of a population can shift by well over one S.D. in 30 years, only a purblind racist determined to ignore the facts would think it made sense to use IQ scores to deduce innate cognitive differences between such groups.

Not even Claude Steele, the author who originated the idea, thinks that his data prove that eliminating ST will eliminate the black white IQ gap. Now, ST could very well be the cause ( as Claude Steele believes it is) , but no data show a reduction in the gap due to it.

As far as bias is concerned, why is it that there is no black-white IQ gap on forward digit span, but there is a black-white IQ gap on backwards digit span? In other words, what “bias” causes backward digit span to be harder than forward digit span?

Herrnstein and Murray:
“The first involves the digit span subtest, part of the widely used Wechsler intelligence tests. It has two forms: forward digit span, in which the subject tries to repeat a sequence of numbers in the order read to him, and backward digit span, in which the subject tries to repeat the sequence of numbers backward. The test is simple in concept, uses numbers that are familiar to everyone, and calls on no cultural information besides knowing numbers. The digit span is especially informative regarding test motivation not just because of the low cultural loading of the items but because the backward form is twice as g-loaded as the forward form, it is a much better measure of general intelligence. The reason is that reversing the numbers is mentally more demanding than repeating them in the heard order, as readers can determine for themselves by a little self-testing.”

“Draw the diagram, Max. Show us the two distinct peaks in the two different Gaussian curves. Then tell me the difference is genetic when maybe 80% of the test subjects in each category are mixed race. I think you borrowed that notion from bigot without understanding what it might mean.”

I already said that the causation of the BW IQ gap is unknown at this point.

Nick, you’re right. I realsied that i was not careful enough with my word. So yeah, we know that part of the gap is genetic, not all of it. Interestingly, this is exactly what hereditarians say about most gaps that exist, even IQ gap.

You’re right about the IQ stuff , hence my repeatedly saying that the cause is currently unknown.

There is no proof that eliminating stereotype threat reduces the black white IQ gap, not that it even partially reduces it!

Um…no ‘proof’ maybe but it took me literally 30 seconds to find this article demonstrating lower scores on cognitive testing in the presence of stereotype threat. I doubt it’s the best one on the subject either, just the one I came up with in less than one minute. If you can’t find any data suggesting that eliminating stereotype threat improves performance in a wide range of people who face prejudice (gender, sexual orientation, race, even things like weight and height) then it’s because you’re not looking.

you know that is a valid point as IQ tests as has been said here favor white men women would there fore be expected to score lower and the fact that women have been discouraged from entering scientific fields and suffer from workplace discrimination when they do get into the sciences it is no wonder that there are fewer women represented in the winners lists.
context is important it is the real world which is the context where ideas are to be judged not the abstract theoretical ideology.
uncle frogy

This paper raised the possibility that culturally-shared stereotypes suggesting poor performance of certain groups can, when made salient in a context involving the stereotype, disrupt performance of an individual who identifies with that group. This effect was termed stereotype threat, and the existence and consequences of stereotype threat were investigated in four experiments. Experiment 1 involved African American and White college students who took a difficult test using items from the GRE Verbal exam under one of two conditions. In the stereotype threat condition, students were told that their performance on the test would be a good indicator of their underlying intellectual abilities. In the non-threat condition, they were told that the test was simply a problem solving exercise and was not diagnostic of ability. Performance was compared in the two conditions after statistically controlling for self-reported SAT scores. African American participants performed less well than their white counterparts in the stereotype threat condition, but in the non-threat condition their performance equaled that of their white counterparts.

From a quick scan of the article and what I remember reading earlier today in the comments, here are some highlights:
1) Flynn is in Effect all around the world and between groups (eg. Black and White)
2) Almost no specific genetic factors have been found to be associate with intelligence
3) Socioeconomic factors play a role in intelligence at many levels and improving these make people more intelligent
4) Raven’s Progressive Matrices are not culturally neutral
5) Stereotype threat can cause people to perform worse on intelligence test

I really wish FtB would include explicit instructions on how to use the approved HTML tags and attributes

Yeah, especially given the fact that the list under the comment box contains attributes that do nothing.

You and your friends here think that the fact that there is more variation within a race than between is a sufficient condition for biological uniformity . But when I point out that the same is true of dogs

You’re confused.

The first time I thought you had just momentarily switched the words around, but now you’re doing it again.

There is more variation within any human race, however defined, than between them; with dogs it’s the other way around, because most dog breeds contain almost no variation – they’re severely inbred.

the overwhelming majority of USAians are, from the DNA if not visibly, mixed race

Visibly, too. I needed to stare at TV images of Colin “Paleface” Powell for a long time to understand why he’s considered “black” in the US.

The same person can be “black” in the US, “coloured” as opposed to “black” in South Africa, and “white” in Brazil.

Herrnstein and Murray:
“[…] The digit span is especially informative regarding test motivation not just because of the low cultural loading of the items but because the backward form is twice as g-loaded as the forward form, it is a much better measure of general intelligence.

I dare you find one science nobelist with a low-IQ. They’re probably all well over 130.

Do you have any data at all on the IQ of any Nobel Prize winner? Actual results from an IQ test that they took, not speculation about their IQ.

Nobel winners are…mixed. James Watson seems to be (have been?) a rather stupid person, based on his writing and public speaking, but he was stellar at stealing other people’s results. Einstein was brilliant at math and conceptualizing, but the poor man couldn’t come to a conclusion to save his life. Threw out the cosmologic constant and let’s not even get into his statements about quantum mechanics. Come to think of it, his truly creative work seems to have ended when he divorced his first wife. Hmm…Then there’s poor Shockley. Would have agreed with you 100% about the innate superiority of some people, poor man.

Anyway, women are less likely to win science Nobels, Fields medals and similar prizes because the variation of female IQs is lower – there are relatively fewer very stupid women and fewer very smart women than there are very stupid men or very smart men.

Of course. That must be the explanation. It can’t possibly be that women are more likely to be passed over for a prize that they deserved **cough** Meitner, Franklin, Bell…**cough** There are more men who suffer from impaired intellectual functioning because men only have one x chromosome and if a gene necessary for normal intellectual function on the X chromosome is mutated and nonfunctional (but not a dominant negative) then they’re more likely to have obvious phenotypic damage. As far as I know, there is no real reliable data suggesting that there are more men with truly high intellectual function once you correct for bias, stereotype threat, differences in treatment, etc.

“Um…no ‘proof’ maybe but it took me literally 30 seconds to find this article demonstrating lower scores on cognitive testing in the presence of stereotype threat. I doubt it’s the best one on the subject either, just the one I came up with in less than one minute. If you can’t find any data suggesting that eliminating stereotype threat improves performance in a wide range of people who face prejudice (gender, sexual orientation, race, even things like weight and height) then it’s because you’re not looking.”

That study shows a significant difference in neurological performance (NP) between African-Americans subject to threat and African Americans not subject to threat. But just as i said in my previous comment, the gap between the non-threat whites and non-threat blacks is exactly what it always has been (roughly 15 IQ points).

The same comment by Sackett of Aronson and Steele’s paper applies here:
“Thus, rather than showing that eliminating threat eliminates the large score gap on standardized tests, the research actually shows something very different. Specifically, absent stereotype threat, the African American–White difference is just what one would expect based on the African American–White difference in SAT scores, whereas in the presence of stereotype threat, the difference is larger than would be expected based on the difference in SAT scores.”

There is no proof that eliminating stereotype threat reduces the black white IQ gap, not that it even partially reduces it!

Are you literally able to understand that eleminating stereotype threat does NOTHING towards eliminating actual socioeconomic differences that are in effect before people are even born (like the unequal access to prenatal care in the USA which severely disadvantages black women)

*I’ wondering if the nym is an homage to the German asshole of the same one

You claim that the fact that there is more variation within human races than between is a sufficient condition for biological uniformity among humans. But if the same is true of dogs — if there is more variation among dog breeds than within, then does that mean all dogs are biologically uniform?

Clearly it does not, and therefore it is not a sufficient condition in humans for biological uniformity.

“Oh, and minor height difference make no difference to functioning adults. You lose again loser.”

I brought up the height example to show you that it is possible for genetic differences to exist between populations.

I note that MS is clinging very hard to a single commentary, not even a peer reviewed article, but simply a commentary, to support his views. Perhaps because he doesn’t have any actual data suggesting that he is right?

Dogs are specifically bred for certain characteristics. Humans aren’t. Humans love to outcross and generally will at any excuse. Suppose there were a specific gene that was associated with, say, a 10 point higher IQ (assuming, for the moment, that IQ means anything) in people who had one or more copies of this gene compared to those that don’t. Let’s call the alleles N (the higher intelligence version, which is “dominant” in this scheme) and n. Let’s even say that N occurred as a mutation in the first migrants to Europe. I’ll even make the claim easier for the racists and say that N was pro-survival and therefore flourished in early Europe, though a gene that increased intelligence could easily have been anti-survival in early Europe where boredom and suspicion of people who appeared in any way different were common problems.

Ok, so now we come to the Americas. I’m going to ignore everything but the colonies that would become the US for now. Sorry, but I’m trying to simplify. So, some Anglos hit the shore a few hundred years ago. And immediately nearly starve, despite their inherently greater intelligence. Fortunately, the dumb Amerind take pity on them and teach them how to survive. Some of them find each other cute and have kids together. The kids may end up being labeled “white” or “Indian”, depending more on the circumstances of their birth than on any genetic or even phenotypic difference. Ok, now the superior Europeans decide that they don’t have to do dirty work and kidnap some Africans to do their dirty work for them. They also get around to persecuting and committing genocide against the Amerind populations. But not all at once, not completely. They keep having sex and babies with them at the same time as they are murdering them and destroying their culture. They also make it a habit to rape the women they kidnapped and force them to bear their children. Liasons between the Amerind and Africans are not exactly unknown either. And then the country expands, eventually running into the dubiously European (really Amerind, Arabic, European, and northern African) Hispanics of Mexico and Florida and they add their genes to the mix. Not even to mention the Chinese people who build the railroads, etc.

In short, by the time you get to the 21st century, virtually no one labeled as “black” is of anything close to pure African origin. Most American blacks who are not recent immigrants have significant European and Amerind ancestry as well as African ancestry. So why didn’t the gene N get distributed among them? Conversely, few people who call themselves “white” but whose ancestors are long time Americans are without some admixture of other races. Why hasn’t N been diluted in the “white” population?

The only logical explanation is that there is no N. People who are labeled black tend to be poorer, get less early health care, have more deprived environments, and generally have fewer opportunities to develop the skills that would lead to high scores on IQ tests than whites. Despite the labels being convenient fictions with both groups being truly mixed race.

A scientific study says that there is more variation within a breed than between, but that’s still not enough evidence for you?

A study on dogs. Purebred dogs at that, i.e. animals that were allowed to breed only in a very small gene pool with a very specific purpose in mind during the breeding. This is completely not how humans reproduce. Humans will and typically even can breed with anyone they can find.

Dogs are specifically bred for certain characteristics. Humans aren’t. Humans love to outcross and generally will at any excuse. Suppose there were a specific gene that was associated with, say, a 10 point higher IQ (assuming, for the moment, that IQ means anything) in people who had one or more copies of this gene compared to those that don’t. Let’s call the alleles N (the higher intelligence version, which is “dominant” in this scheme) and n. Let’s even say that N occurred as a mutation in the first migrants to Europe. I’ll even make the claim easier for the racists and say that N was pro-survival and therefore flourished in early Europe, though a gene that increased intelligence could easily have been anti-survival in early Europe where boredom and suspicion of people who appeared in any way different were common problems.

You still don’t get it.

You and your friends here claim that the following condition is sufficient for biological uniformity among humans: Since there is more variation within a race than between, there cannot be differences between races/populations. But this is also true of dogs, and therefore there cannot be any differences among dog breeds, too.

But that is clearly false, and therefore the initial condition is not a sufficient one.

Now the rest of your comment seems to be saying that because of miscegenation, there can be no genetic differences between populations, but this is false. There is a height gap between northern and southern Europeans that is partially due to genes — and perhaps selection.

A scientific study says that there is more variation within a breed than between, but that’s still not enough evidence for you?

A study on dogs. Purebred dogs at that, i.e. animals that were allowed to breed only in a very small gene pool with a very specific purpose in mind during the breeding. This is completely not how humans reproduce. Humans will and typically even can breed with anyone they can find.

This is getting really frustrating.

You claim that the fact that there is more variation within a race/population than between is a sufficient condition for the non-existence of genetic differences between populations/races. But this is also true of dogs, so does that means that dog breeds don’t differ?

Bullshit. You can’t identify population someone comes from if you look at a single point in the genome.
However, the more you look at, the more precisely someone can be placed. In some cases, it’s possible to trace someone’s ancestors to a single town or small island. Because people in the age before rail and planes didn’t move around much. Still the case in the Alps. Some valleys, everyone looks like they come from one family.

_______________________________________

@David Marjanovic

There is more variation within any human race, however defined, than between them;

There were two seperate papers calling him out on his bullshit, one right after publication and one some years later.
_________________________________

@Dianne

As far as I know, there is no real reliable data suggesting that there are more men with truly high intellectual function once you correct for bias, stereotype threat, differences in treatment, etc.

Studies showing higher variation in intelligence variation among males have been replicated numerous times.
Are all of those.. wrong? And please do explain how differences in treatment would make someone.. dumber? Or how bias would make a woman score less on an IQ test?

___________________________________________

But when we know that the measured IQ of a population can shift by well over one S.D. in 30 years, only a purblind racist determined to ignore the facts would think it made sense to use IQ scores to deduce innate cognitive differences between such groups.

How about this? Certain population groups have brains that are cca 10% smaller by volume. As determined by modern methods, such as MRI scans and such. These groups also lack on of the genes responsible from brain size, which was apparently introduced to human population from neanderthals, who had bigger brains.

___________________________________________

@sugarfrosted, 110

The thing about the Ashkenazim being super smart is weird to me, given the history. For years IQ tests were abused to mark them as being incredibly dumb. Now since WWII they’re suddenly super smart.

Only in America, and only recent immigrant who couldn’t really speak English. In Europe, Jews have been believed to be really smart and crafty for centuries. There’s proverbs on it, jokes, etc. Jews themselves have numerous jokes about that.

And take note that children of these immigrants were so successful, that Ivy League schools instituted quotas on Jews, which were only lifted post WWII. These days, there are no quotas on Jews, but there apparently are on quotas on Asians in the same schools, as they’re under-represented at certain elite schools. (Harvard, for example)

Since there is more variation within a race than between, there cannot be differences between races/populations. But this is also true of dogs, and therefore there cannot be any differences among dog breeds, too.

No fuckwit, you don’t and can’t get it due your bigoted presuppositions.
What counted with your article, was they were able to find markers for breeds. The rest is bullshit.
Until you provide those markers for humans, and show that they mean anything other than superficial things, like height and skin color (they are superficial except to a bigot), you have nothing. And you have nothing.

However, the more you look at, the more precisely someone can be placed. In some cases, it’s possible to trace someone’s ancestors to a single town or small island.

And this has what to do with their capabilities, except for their culture? That is the problem bigots must overcome, and they can’t.

Studies showing higher variation in intelligence variation among males have been replicated numerous times.
Are all of those.. wrong?

And the middle is still 100. Variation from norms is meaningful and genetically related how? And not a cultural thing? Still not making your point bigot.

How about this? Certain population groups have brains that are cca 10% smaller by volume. As determined by modern methods, such as MRI scans and such. These groups also lack on of the genes responsible from brain size, which was apparently introduced to human population from neanderthals, who had bigger brains.

Bigger or smaller doesn’t seem to make any difference. Where is the genetic, and not cultural tie-in? Still yapping hot air, not reality. Typical of folks who can only feel good about themselves if they have others they perceive as inferior to point to. I point to you….

Sith Lords? Eldar? Numenor? This is a joke, right? I love a lot of this pop culture stuff myself (LotR, WH40K, classic Star Wars), but I would NEVER refer to myself as any of those things. Unless it was during a carnival or on Halloween, perhaps. How pathetic-yet-arrogant. And that thread of pathetic-yet-arrogant seems to wind through the entire description of them in this article. I had heard of HBD, which is bad enough. But this Dark Enlightenment crap seems utterly ridiculous to me. All the worse that it actually functions like a cult and can thus – if not on any large scale – have massive influence on and control over its members.

And please do explain how differences in treatment would make someone.. dumber? Or how bias would make a woman score less on an IQ test?

I’m honestly rather shocked that anyone in the 21st century with access to the internet would ask this question. Studies have shown that babies are treated differently based on people’s perception of their gender from birth. Put a baby boy in a dress and suddenly everyone remarks on how cuddly “she” is, call her beautiful, etc. Put the boy back in a blue onesie and suddenly “he’s” smart and strong and people encourage him to try to move, etc. It continues in the classroom where boys are called on more often, girls are used as props and aids for the teachers, etc.

Semi-anecdote, but with actual data: In college, I had a class which was co-taught by three professors. One of them claimed that boys or young men spoke in class more often than girls or young women. This seemed suspect to me, so over the next week I noted the number of times someone spoke in class and whether they volunteered or were called on. The results were that women volunteered about as often as men. However, if the professor requested a response from a certain student, i.e. said, “What do you think of that, X?” X was about 50% more likely to be male. This pattern was robust over classes in sociology, physics, calculus, computer science, and, later, introduction to internal medicine and biostatistics. Two different schools, about 10 different professors all showed this pattern. I wish I had had the sense to talk to one of the profs running the class (who seemed to have a rivalry with the prof who made the original statement) and talk about formalizing the study for publication. Why didn’t I? Because I was convinced that he wouldn’t want to bother with me.

I think I will take a slightly different tack with Max – everyone else here seems to have the BS aspect of what is being cited down pretty well, no need for me to weigh in there, so…

Ok, Max, let’s say I accept your premise (I don’t, but hey, let’s pretend).
What next?
What changes in public policy do you suggest based on this?
How should we alter funding based on your premise? University policy? Hiring practices?
You’re in charge of the world, Max, and you believe some groups of people are just inherently smarter than others. You’re hiring, and you’ve got a group of applicants from a lot of different ethnic groups applying. What do you do?

And please do explain how differences in treatment would make someone.. dumber? Or how bias would make a woman score less on an IQ test?

I’m honestly rather shocked that anyone in the 21st century with access to the internet would ask this question.

I skipped most of this thread. I see the dumb troll is still being dumb.

This is the question of how much IQ is genetically determined. Some is but by no means all.

We know from near countless studies that IQ is plastic, effected by many nongenetic factors. Notably among them is early childhood environment. Kids growing up with poverty and malnutrition are going to take an IQ hit. The early year or two is critical.

Contrawise, kids growing up in benign wealthier environments with good early conditions and good educations are going to gain an IQ advantage.

Estimates in the academic research of the heritability of IQ have varied from below 0.5[2] to a high of 0.8 (where 1.0 indicates that monozygotic twins have no variance in IQ and 0 indicates that their IQs are completely uncorrelated).[4] Turkheimer (2003) found that for children of low socioeconomic status heritability of IQ falls almost to zero.[5] IQ heritability increases during early childhood, but it is unclear whether it stabilizes thereafter.[6] A 1996 statement by the American Psychological Association gave about .45 for children and about .75 during and after adolescence.[7] A 2004 meta-analysis of reports in Current Directions in Psychological Science gave an overall estimate of around .85 for 18-year-olds and older.[8] The general figure for heritability of IQ is about 0.5 across multiple studies in varying populations.[9]

I’m not going to waste too much of my valuable lifespan on trolls like MS.

1. “The general figure for heritability of IQ is about 0.5 across multiple studies in varying populations.[9]”

2. “Turkheimer (2003) found that for children of low socioeconomic status heritability of IQ falls almost to zero.”

Max Sarrazin will have to have his Thinking Brain service dog explain this to him. This guy really is ignorant and dumb.

Put the boy back in a blue onesie and suddenly “he’s” smart and strong and people encourage him to try to move, etc. It continues in the classroom where boys are called on more often, girls are used as props and aids for the teachers, etc.

Then why girls do better at all levels of schooling than boys if they are so ‘disadvantaged’?

Also, do you suggest making girls play with legos or other boy toys and dressing them differently?

The David Reimer debacle shows that the differences in interests are very likely innate, and trying to change them is probably pointless. And harmful.

However, if the professor requested a response from a certain student, i.e. said, “What do you think of that, X?” X was about 50% more likely to be male

What was the sex ratio of students?

________________________

Regarding greater variance of male tests scores..

Sex differences in central tendency, variability, and numbers of high scores on mental tests have been extensively studied. Research has not always seemed to yield consistent results, partly because most studies have not used representative samples of national populations. An analysis of mental test scores from six studies that used national probability samples provided evidence that although average sex differences have been generally small and stable over time, the test scores of males consistently have larger variance. Except in tests of reading comprehension, perceptual speed, and associative memory, males typically outnumber females substantially among high-scoring individuals.

another

Why are males over-represented at the upper extremes of intelligence? One possibility for which there is some empirical support is that variance is greater among adult males. There is little published evidence of the development of that variability – is it manifest in early childhood or does it develop later?

We explored sex differences in phenotypic variance in scores on a general ability factor extracted from several tests of verbal and non-verbal ability at ages 2, 3, 4, 7, 9 and 10 (Ns from > 10,000 to > 2000) in a sample of British children.

We found greater variance, by Levene’s test of homogeneity of variance, among boys at every age except age two despite the girls’ mean advantage from ages two to seven. Girls are significantly over-represented, as measured by chi-square tests, at the high tail and boys at the low tail at ages 2, 3 and 4. By age 10 the boys have a higher mean, greater variance and are over-represented in the high tail. Sex differences in variance emerge early – even before pre-school – suggesting that they are not determined by educational influences.

And please do explain how differences in treatment would make someone.. dumber?

I believe the term you are looking for is performance. A quick think using logic would have made it apparent that environment is the biggest factor in measuring any given ability.

Let’s use cars as an example. Two cars roll off the assembly line. The only differences between these cars are the color of the paint and upholstery, and small manufacturing differences such as micro cracks and metal impurities that are unique to each car.

One car is blue. It gets all of it’s scheduled maintenance on time, using the highest quality oil and car parts. It is only driven on paved surfaces and it is kept in a garage.

The other car is red. It does not get any maintenance until something breaks. The cheapest oil and replacement parts are used. It is driven off road and on gravel roads. It is parked outdoors.

At the end of 3 years, which car will most likely win in a race? Which car will be in better condition?

But you seem to have missed the relevant part of the Parker et al. 2004 paper that you cite, if you are trying to compare dogs and humans. Here is what one of the (coauthors has to say)coauthors has to say about the part of the paper you missed.

“These restrictive breeding practices reduce effective population size and increase overall genetic drift among domestic dogs, resulting in the loss of genetic diversity within breeds and greater divergence among them,” writes Ostrander, who participated in a landmark study of the genomic relationship of 85 different dog breeds. “For example, variation among breeds accounts for 27% of total genetic variation, as opposed to 5-10% among human populations” (Parker et al., 2004).

There is a shift towards amongst breed genetic diversity of dogs that is not seen in human populations due to artificial selection in dog breeding. It is also one of the reasons why I find the dog breed, human population comparison useless.

You’re changing the topic, Nerd. I said the variation within breeds is smaller than the variation between them, Max “Thilo” Sarrazin linked to a paper that shows it’s the other way around – he’s right about this point, I was wrong, he does not lose on this topic.

Your point is important, it’s just quite unrelated to the one you’re responding to.

Also, commas are important people! :-}

There is more variation within any human race, however defined, than between them;

Uh… that article questions the conclusion Lewontin drew from his results (“that division of humanity into races is taxonomically invalid”, whatever that is actually supposed to mean), but not the results themselves. In fact, it does the opposite:

In the 1972 study “The Apportionment of Human Diversity”, Richard Lewontin […] found that the majority of the total genetic variation between humans (i.e., of the 0.1% of DNA that varies between individuals), 85.4%, is found within populations, 8.3% of the variation is found between populations within a “race”, and only 6.3% was found to account for the racial classification. Numerous later studies have confirmed his findings.[5]

Reference 5 is this book chapter from 2010 (pdf). It’s long, but that’s because it contains an introduction into population genetics… which you should read. :-) If you want a soundbite, here’s one from page 595:

A key conclusion of the paper [by Lewontin 1972] is that 85.4% of the total genetic variation observed occurred within each group. That is, he reported that the vast majority of genetic differences are found within populations rather than between them. In this paper and his book The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change [30], Lewontin concluded that genetic variation, therefore, provided no basis for human racial classifications.Lewontin’s argument is an important one, and separates studying the geographic distribution of genetic variation in humans from searching for a biological basis to racial classification. His finding has been reproduced in study after study up through the present: two random individuals from any one group (which could be a continent or even a local population) are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world (see proportion of variation within populations in table 20.1 and [20]).

Ref. 20 is from 2001. Table 20.1 is taken from ref. 53, which dates from 2002, 30 years after Lewontin’s paper. Lewontin is not a coauthor of either. I strongly recommend you take a good long look at table 20.1 (p. 596).

Mind you, that table still doesn’t mean that what little variation there is between populations doesn’t show geographic structure. It does; the authors stress this right under the table, citing refs 12 and 53; ref. 12 is the paper that has “Lewontin’s fallacy” in its title. But the fact remains that I was Netherlands-on-Spain right when I wrote “[t]here is more variation within any human race, however defined, than between them”.

Also, as figure 20.6 shows, that there’s a geographic signal in the data does not mean that the data fall neatly into races. There isn’t a number of races that would explain the data noticeably better than most other numbers tested in that figure (which is from ref. 52, an open-access paper published in 2005).

Studies showing higher variation in intelligence variation among males have been replicated numerous times.
Are all of those.. wrong?

And please do explain how differences in treatment would make someone.. dumber?

Not “dumber” – perform less well on a test.

You’ve probably been to school; remember the factors that influenced how well you did at a test.

How about this? Certain population groups have brains that are cca 10% smaller by volume. As determined by modern methods, such as MRI scans and such. These groups also lack on of the genes responsible from brain size, which was apparently introduced to human population from neanderthals, who had bigger brains.

If you don’t want to believe what several of the commenters here are trying to tell you, like social constructs affect a persons performance on intelligence test, please go read the review paper I posted @141.

There is even a section on Ashkenazi Jews and a possible (ie. speculative) biological basis for their higher IQ.

Also, do you suggest making girls play with legos or other boy toys and dressing them differently?

You could really benefit from taking Crip Dyke’s Online Gender Workshop. Lego’s aren’t “boy toys”. They’re toys that *some* people, such as you, think are for boys. Toys are not inherently gendered. Its society that genders them, just as you’ve done. Boys can play with Barbie dolls or wear dresses. Girls can play with toy trains and GI Joes. Gendering toys (and other activities needs to end-yesterday).

I don’t have any doubts about the existence of the Dark Enlightenment (none significant, anyway), but I do question this account. The mention of D&D in the comments above brought to mind the Dark Dungeons Chick Tract; the account has got the same feel of made-up stuff in it. It really reads to me like someone with no actual knowledge of DE has fabulated the encounter from old bits of D&D and Satanic abuse scares.

Anyway, women are less likely to win science Nobels, Fields medals and similar prizes because the variation of female IQs is lower – there are relatively fewer very stupid women and fewer very smart women than there are very stupid men or very smart men.

Its society that genders them, just as you’ve done. Boys can play with Barbie dolls or wear dresses. Girls can play with toy trains and GI Joes. Gendering toys (and other activities needs to end-yesterday).

Oh really. Read up on the Reimer case.

If you try to make a little boy behave and dress like a little girl, he won’t.

• Brenda Reimer resisted being classified as a girl from the beginning. The first time she wore a dress, she tried to rip it off. She preferred her brother’s toys to her own. (A toy sewing machine was untouched, Colapinto writes, “until the day when Brenda, who loved to take things apart to see how they worked, sneaked a screwdriver from her dad’s tool kit and dismantled the toy.”) She got into fights, insisted on peeing standing up, and ran into terrible problems at school, where the other kids quickly recognized her as someone who didn’t fit the ordinary sexual categories. By the time she was 10, she was declaring that she wanted to grow up to marry a woman, not a man.

If you try to make a little boy behave and dress like a little girl, he won’t.

For fuck’s sake. What that case demonstrates is that some (as it turns out, most) people’s brains have a gender. David Reimer tried to demonstrate that he was being misgendered by refusing/destroying everything that his culture had coded as feminine.

You keep acting as if there’s a dress-hating gene on the Y chromosome.

I have to run, and PZ hasn’t approved the comment yet, so I’m posting it again, in two parts (to get below the limiting number of links), to make sure it’s posted in some way. (Sometimes PZ has been too busy to look at the queue at all.)

You’re changing the topic, Nerd. I said the variation within breeds is smaller than the variation between them, Max “Thilo” Sarrazin linked to a paper that shows it’s the other way around – he’s right about this point, I was wrong, he does not lose on this topic.

Your point is important, it’s just quite unrelated to the one you’re responding to.

Also, commas are important people! :-}

There is more variation within any human race, however defined, than between them;

Uh… that article questions the conclusion Lewontin drew from his results (“that division of humanity into races is taxonomically invalid”, whatever that is actually supposed to mean), but not the results themselves. In fact, it does the opposite:

In the 1972 study “The Apportionment of Human Diversity”, Richard Lewontin […] found that the majority of the total genetic variation between humans (i.e., of the 0.1% of DNA that varies between individuals), 85.4%, is found within populations, 8.3% of the variation is found between populations within a “race”, and only 6.3% was found to account for the racial classification. Numerous later studies have confirmed his findings.[5]

Reference 5 is this book chapter from 2010 (pdf). It’s long, but that’s because it contains an introduction into population genetics… which you should read. :-) If you want a soundbite, here’s one from page 595:

A key conclusion of the paper [by Lewontin 1972] is that 85.4% of the total genetic variation observed occurred within each group. That is, he reported that the vast majority of genetic differences are found within populations rather than between them. In this paper and his book The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change [30], Lewontin concluded that genetic variation, therefore, provided no basis for human racial classifications.Lewontin’s argument is an important one, and separates studying the geographic distribution of genetic variation in humans from searching for a biological basis to racial classification. His finding has been reproduced in study after study up through the present: two random individuals from any one group (which could be a continent or even a local population) are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world (see proportion of variation within populations in table 20.1 and [20]).

Ref. 20 is from 2001. Table 20.1 is taken from ref. 53, which dates from 2002, 30 years after Lewontin’s paper. Lewontin is not a coauthor of either. I strongly recommend you take a good long look at table 20.1 (p. 596).

Mind you, that table still doesn’t mean that what little variation there is between populations doesn’t show geographic structure. It does; the authors stress this right under the table, citing refs 12 and 53; ref. 12 is the paper that has “Lewontin’s fallacy” in its title. But the fact remains that I was Netherlands-on-Spain right when I wrote “[t]here is more variation within any human race, however defined, than between them”.

Also, as figure 20.6 shows, that there’s a geographic signal in the data does not mean that the data fall neatly into races. There isn’t a number of races that would explain the data noticeably better than most other numbers tested in that figure (which is from ref. 52, an open-access paper published in 2005).

And please do explain how differences in treatment would make someone.. dumber?

Not “dumber” – perform less well on a test.

You’ve probably been to school; remember the factors that influenced how well you did at a test.

How about this? Certain population groups have brains that are cca 10% smaller by volume. As determined by modern methods, such as MRI scans and such. These groups also lack on of the genes responsible from brain size, which was apparently introduced to human population from neanderthals, who had bigger brains.

If you try to make a little boy behave and dress like a little girl, he won’t.

What the hell?
You fail at reading comprehension.
What I said was:

Boys can play with Barbie dolls or wear dresses. Girls can play with toy trains and GI Joes. Gendering toys (and other activities needs to end-yesterday).

I didn’t say anything about MAKING children do anything. I said they *can* play with these toys that are gendered by society. See the difference? You’re talking about forcing children to do something, and I’m talking about them making a decision themselves. Yes, I agree that if you force a child to do something, they’re likely to rebel, but that’s not what I’m talking about and I can’t believe you’re this fucking dishonest to not understand what I said.

You’ve probably been to school; remember the factors that influenced how well you did at a test.

I’m sure xe has. But I think Alex is privilege blind bc xe doesn’t seem to understand that many factors can affect academic achievement. Factors such as hunger and poverty (bolding mine):

What are the effects of child poverty?
Psychological research has demonstrated that living in poverty has a wide range of negative effects on the physical and mental health and wellbeing of our nation’s children. Poverty impacts children within their various contexts at home, in school, and in their neighborhoods and communities.
Poverty is linked with negative conditions such as substandard housing, homelessness, inadequate nutrition and food insecurity, inadequate child care, lack of access to health care, unsafe neighborhoods, and underresourced schools which adversely impact our nation’s children.

Poorer children and teens are also at greater risk for several negative outcomes such as poor academic achievement, school dropout, abuse and neglect, behavioral and socioemotional problems, physical health problems, and developmental delays.

These effects are compounded by the barriers children and their families encounter when trying to access physical and mental health care.

Economists estimate that child poverty costs an estimated $500 billion a year to the U.S. economy; reduces productivity and economic output by 1.3 percent of GDP; raises crime and increases health expenditure (Holzer et al., 2008)https://www.apa.org/pi/families/poverty.aspx#

Also, do you suggest making girls play with legos or other boy toys and dressing them differently?

Y’know, if you were one of those very smart people, and even the tiniest bit insightful, you might come to an enlightening conclusion as to why you class Legos as a ‘boy toy’. Legos are not gender oriented. Neither are toys like Lincoln Logs (if you’re older, you’ll remember those.) What is gender oriented are cultural norms, which obviously aren’t challenged enough. You’ve just proved yourself wrong.

As for ‘dressing them differently’, just what in the fuckety fuck does that mean? Do you mean dressing girls in something other than bright pink princess fairy dresses with bows in their hair? FFS, you have some damn ugly Bayesian priors, and you’d benefit from figuring out just how deep your biases run, and rooting them out. You’d be a better person.

Beautiful illustration: This is a post about a letter that complains about how soccer is supposedly ruining America. The letter claims that soccer is for girls.

Over here, soccer is for boys and men; it is widely taken for granted that the only women who play it (at least regularly) are butch lesbians – to the extent that when a women’s soccer team was interviewed on TV (by a comedy show) a few years ago and asked if they were lesbians, the captain smiled and quietly said “that’s part of [women’s soccer], isn’t it…?” after a second or two of silence. – Oh, BTW, Germany recently became world champion in women’s soccer, and just about nobody, even in Germany, cared. Right now, while the men are having their world cup, there are flags everywhere.

You know that somebody is a complete idiot and a young one at that when they call Legos a “boy toy”.

Or thinks you have to make girls play with Legos.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Tony (#192)

xe doesn’t seem to understand that many factors can affect academic achievement. Factors such as hunger and poverty

Then there’s disease, including parasites, which may be the factor with more impact than any other. Intelligence is highly dependent on access to vaccines, pesticides, mosquito netting/screens, and disease treatments (both for children and pregnant mothers) and on containing feces within closed sanitation systems.

My bad. The numbers quoted weren’t absolute percentages but rather ratios normalized for the percentage of each gender in the class. The answer to your question is that it varied, but that doesn’t matter, see above. Ja, my verbal SAT never did get as high as my math either.

Random reflection on all this…It’s not impossible that intelligence would vary among human subspecies. There’s no reason why it couldn’t happen. But it almost certainly didn’t for one simple reason: there are few, if any, human subgroups that were isolated long enough for such a shift to occur.

There are differences between human subpopulations–call them “races”, if you will. It’s certainly a shorter word. But almost all the known differences are due to extreme evolutionary pressure. For example, smaller melanocytes: the people who migrated to Europe had to have those or die of vitamin D deficiency. There just isn’t enough sun to survive otherwise, unless you’ve got a high vit D diet, i.e. the Inuits. Or lactose tolerance: it’s a major survival and reproductive advantage in areas with a short growing season and long period of time where you simply can’t gather your food reliably. Being able to keep herbivore animals (which can survive on dried grass–something humans can’t do) and drink their milk is a tremendous advantage in that situation. Or hemoglobinopathies. Virtually every known hemoglobinopathy, RBC enzyme disorder, and other persistent mutation in the erythrocyte is about protection against malaria. Malaria is so bad that a mutation that makes 25% of your offspring die in early childhood is an ADVANTAGE if it protects you against malaria, even partially. Hence, sickle globin, G6PD deficiency, etc.

But there is no similar pressure to become more intelligent. It doesn’t protect against malaria or the plague, doesn’t prevent starvation, simply doesn’t answer any of the crises that people have faced over the millennia.

So, you might say, what. Isolated populations are subject to genetic drift. What if, say, the people who live on the Faro islands just happened to have good genes for intelligence and, since they were isolate, keep breeding smarter and smarter people? The answer is, that human populations have never been that isolated for long enough. Sure, there were (probably are) places where a single valley is “the world” and everyone spends their whole lives there. But even then, the crazy traders come through, the people who were kicked out of the valley next door by invaders try to join and/or take over, the nutcase adolescent who never fit in tries to go over the pass…And some of the crazy traders came from a long way away.

Finally, if there were a major difference in intelligence based on genetics, it wouldn’t be between Africans and Europeans or Africans and Asians or Europeans and Asians. It would be between any of those groups and Americans (I mean the people who migrated over the Bering Strait, not the invaders of the last few centuries) or the Australians. Africans, Europeans, and Asians have been cross migrating, communicating, and hopping in bed with each other consistently, if not frequently, over time. The Americas and (probably) Australia were more isolated and had more time for genetic drift to occur. The very reason that African slaves were brought to the Americas is that Africans are resistant to European diseases and didn’t drop like flies when forced into contact with Europeans. Why were they resistant to European diseases? Because they’d had contact with Europeans. What do people who have contact with each other do? Interbreed! So…that’s it. There simply hasn’t been a chance for a genetic difference in intelligence between Europeans and Africans to form. Sorry, racists. It just isn’t plausible.

BTW, while I totally oppose what was done to David Reimer and many intersex children, he’s just one data point, and he’s the outlier. Most intersex children who got assigned one gender or the other and whose bodies were shaped accordingly live(d) their lives without major body dysphoria.
But before some idiot jumps at this, let me repeat: It is wrong to surgically alter the bodies of children without real medical need just because adults can’t deal with not being able to neatly pigeonhole children.

+++dianne

. Africans, Europeans, and Asians have been cross migrating, communicating, and hopping in bed with each other consistently, if not frequently, over time.

Yep, I always wonder if these people ever looked into a history book and at a map of Europe. For 2-3000 years every major army passed through the area where I’m from. There’s even a dialect word derived from the habit of young local women to visit the tents of foreign soldiers and that’s only talking about the more or less consensual fucking…

*** There’s no reason why it couldn’t happen. But it almost certainly didn’t for one simple reason: there are few, if any, human subgroups that were isolated long enough for such a shift to occur.***

@ Dianne,

There was sufficient isolation for average differences in brain morphology to arise. For example, Australian Aborigines have particularly good levels of visual memory and indeed are noted to have 25% larger visual cortex regions than European Australians. There are also average differences across other groups.

In terms of time for a shift to occur, I’d recommend this post by Steve Hsu which notes that you could get a 1 standard deviation shift in a quantitative heritable trait (eg. height or g) over 1000 years, let alone 10,000.

Note that group differences don’t disappear when you control for SES.* In any case, as noted above in the Hsu post ultimately these kinds of debates about whether there has been differential selection between groups of a quantitative trait (as opposed to lactose or altitude tolerance, which are controlled by small sets of loci) can be resolved using genomic data as the cost of sequencing falls.

Australian Aborigines have particularly good levels of visual memory and indeed are noted to have 25% larger visual cortex regions than European Australians. There are also average differences across other groups.

Reference? Preferably to something peer reviewed. The only link you provided doesn’t even mention Australians. Admittedly, if there were a group isolated enough to have that kind of genetic drift occur, that would probably be it. But again, visual memory and visual cortex are not the same as intelligence. Show me a group with demonstrably better executive function and overall learning ability. Preferably with specific polymorphisms linking the difference to specific genes and not to, say, normal brain plasticity.

It always struck me that those who argue for the heightened averages across demographic groups were rather average themselves. It’s almost like they were attempting to compensate for their own status as an average within their own group.

Bonus points when they get regional or nationalistic with regard to the specifics of the superiority of the average person within those groups as well.

I also remember seeing a while back the corrected graph of what people assume the differences are between groups with regard to some measure of great *importance (with great peaks and low valleys). Instead, it shows a rather linear graph of actual statistical variance with regard to the scores all at around the same height. Does anyone else remember or know of what I speak?

* To those whom establish the value as paramount (which conveniently is not the measures at which they perform poorly.)

It always struck me that those who argue for the heightened averages across demographic groups were rather average themselves. It’s almost like they were attempting to compensate for their own status as an average within their own group.

My daughter is in 1st grade. She is the youngest in the class and some kids tease her because she’s small. I suspect that they’re frankly jealous because they don’t have anything besides being older and taller. Same mindset.

As noted above though – until you identify more alleles you can’t say too much with high confidence. My comment is more to suggest that there could be average differences of .5 – 1 standard deviation in the timeframes available.

Professor Robert Weinberg had a lecture in biology 7.012 at MIT (2004) and noted:

“Whatever ability you want, valued or not so valued, what if those alleles begin to come out? And here’s the worse part. What if somebody begins to look for the frequency of those alleles in different ethnic groups scattered across this planet? Now, you will say to me, well, God has made all his children equal. But the fact is if you look at the details of human evolution, some of which I discussed with you a week ago, last week, you’ll come to realize that most populations in humanity are the modern descendents of very small founder groups.

… So the fact is it’s inescapable that different alleles are going to be present with different frequencies in different inbreeding populations of humanity or populations of humanity that traditionally have been genetically isolated from one another.

It’s not as if all the genes that we carry have been mixed with everybody else’s genes freely over the last 100,000 years. Different groups have bred separately and have, for reasons that I’ve told you, founder affects and genetic drift, acquired different sets and different constellations of alleles. So what’s going to happen then, I ask you without wishing to hear an answer because nobody really knows?”

I’ve got to give observer credit for actually coming up with references. That puts him or her way ahead of the average racist commentator. BTW, you don’t object to me calling you a racist, do you observer? I use it in the scientific sense: one who claims that certain races are superior to others, which is a claim you seem to be making.

Anyway, on to the data.

First point: The data cited are all from a single group, with a single lead author for both papers. It does not appear that anyone has replicated the results. A google scholar search of the results reveals that the 1987 paper has been cited 16 times in the literature and the only cites that refer to any differences between Australians and Caucasians were from the same group. These results have not been confirmed.

I wasn’t able to find a full text or even an abstract for the J Hirschforschungs paper, so can’t comment much on it.

Now, as far as the J Anatomy paper goes…

1. A total of 17 subjects were examined. In 1987. By autopsy. No MRI or functional measurements at all.
2. The mean body weight and age were higher for the caucasians (though not statistically significant) and the time to autopsy was shorter. Since brain to body mass matters, brain size may decrease with age, and the brain decays after death, either of these factors could have confounded the results.
3. The majority of the Caucasians studied had brain problems, mostly CVD on autopsy. Three had cerebral edema. More potential confounders. A brain that has been subject to cerebral edema is likely to be larger and weigh more than a brain that hasn’t. This does not prove that the person whose brain it was was smarter.
4. The boundaries of the various parts of the brain were measured by researchers. I can find no evidence that the researchers were blinded to which sample they had. BIG problem. In fact, that alone essentially invalidates the study, unless I simply missed the bit where they talked about blinding or they forgot to mention it in the article.
5. Obviously, as it’s an autopsy study, no correlation with intelligence or any other behavior is made. We don’t know how smart or how visual any of the men involved were.
6. All subjects were male. Even if the results had any meaning, assuming that they had any meaning in the majority of the population (i.e. in females, who are about 51% of the overall population) would be a stretch.

There was sufficient isolation for average differences in brain morphology to arise. F

Given the plasticity of the human brain, are they significant. Cut out the theory, show us the facts. Like genetics trumps culture.
Brains change during upbringing. Until you racists can separate fact from your idiocy, you lose.

@ dianne #210
Couldn’t agree more that the entire J Anatomy paper is just garbage, My favourite part is how they claim in the summary, that the enlarged visual cortex might be an adaption to the lifestyle :

The results for the visual cortex of Aborigines might represent an adaptation to living conditions in the bush and desert regions of Australia.

, even though they couldn’t even show a significant difference:

The volume of the visual cortex was greater for Aborigines (14-9±2-6ml) than for Caucasians (14-6±2-2ml). The difference was not statistically significant.

Quoting myself is rude and arrogant, but this question seems to shine a revealing light in this sort of debate… and I can’t be arsed to type it again, so…

I think I will take a slightly different tack with Max – everyone else here seems to have the BS aspect of what is being cited down pretty well, no need for me to weigh in there, so…

Ok, Max, let’s say I accept your premise (I don’t, but hey, let’s pretend).
What next?
What changes in public policy do you suggest based on this?
How should we alter funding based on your premise? University policy? Hiring practices?
You’re in charge of the world, Max, and you believe some groups of people are just inherently smarter than others. You’re hiring, and you’ve got a group of applicants from a lot of different ethnic groups applying. What do you do?

Hmm. Yeah, I got that wrong. Anyway, Lewontin only tells half the story. First, he looked at just a few points in the genome. There’s a paper on how many you need to look to distinguish between populations, but a thousand points usually suffice.

Remember that most of the world is descended (mostly) from a quite small population that left Africa ages ago. It’d be.. quite interesting if you couldn’t tell them from those who stayed behind through DNA.

So..On average, he’s a correct.

But that’s just half the story. There’s a number of genes that are almost fixed in populations that are by some thought to be races.

In other words the component of genetic variance on this trait that is between population is nearly 100%, not 15%. This illustrates that the 15% value was an average across the genome, and in fact there are significant differences on the genetic level which can be ancestrally informative.

Moreover, Lewontin asserts that due to that variability race doesn’t make sense, but he misses the forest.
The variations themselves don’t occur randomly, and by looking at that it’s easy to assign people to ancestral populations.

David Reimer tried to demonstrate that he was being misgendered by refusing/destroying everything that his culture had coded as feminine.

You keep acting as if there’s a dress-hating gene on the Y chromosome.

No. But culture codes certain acts as masculine/feminine for a reason, and the reason is biology.
It’s not ‘arbitrary’. I’m not going to go there, mostly because all this is very tiresome, nevertheless,
there are some innate differences in male vs female behavior.

They did what’s called a meta-analysis, combining data from many different published studies. They ended up with details on more than a million boys and girls in more than 300 studies done across the world, including the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

The pattern has held true since 1914 — girls get better grades than boys in all subjects. They excluded one-time tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

______________________________________________________

Look what kind of statement you just made based on one person. You did statistics with a sample size of 1.

Oh my. Are you, perhaps, a resident of Oklahoma?
Well, perhaps it hasn’t occured to you that what held true for him also holds true for every person with gender dysphoria. They kinda struggle with being identified with their biological gender.

Moreover, how do you square the obesity epidemic prevalent among the underclass of America with hunger?

Furthermore, do you truly believe you can consider someone unsuited to modern society*, living on $3 a day, privileged?

______________________________________

@195 Noyd

Then there’s disease, including parasites, which may be the factor with more impact than any other. Intelligence is highly dependent on access to vaccines, pesticides, mosquito netting/screens, and disease treatments (both for children and pregnant mothers) and on containing feces within closed sanitation systems.

Then why did black Americans adopted by wealthy white families grow up to have IQs about the same as their not-so-lucky peers who weren’t raised in well-off families?

Furthermore, why, as I mentioned above, offspring of wealthy black families does no or just very slightly better than that of poor whites?

_______________________________________

@199 Dianne

Random reflection on all this…It’s not impossible that intelligence would vary among human subspecies. There’s no reason why it couldn’t happen. But it almost certainly didn’t for one simple reason: there are few, if any, human subgroups that were isolated long enough for such a shift to occur.

.

I believe you are incorrect. Ashkenazi Jews, who descend from roughly ~(iirc) 400 traders and their families who ventured into Russia around the early middle ages, are quite ahead of most other populations.

Most sub-saharan Africans have no or very few ancestors who lived north of the Sahara (except Somalis and related populations). If you look at descendants of Alexandre Dumas, can you tell they had a black man in their family tree?

_______________________________________

@210 Dianne

BTW, you don’t object to me calling you a racist, do you observer? I use it in the scientific sense: one who claims that certain races are superior to others, which is a claim you seem to be making.

There’s a better word for that, ‘racialist’. Racist is used both to mean those who acknowledge differences and those who use these to excuse unethical behavior.

Personally, I’d find it best if differences in at least innate capabilities were abolished through bioscience. We’re all stupid anyway, compared to some people. It seems likely that natural human DNA contains in itself the possibility for extremely impressive abilities.

And now I’m going to excuse myself, as I have a backlog, and unlike some lucky employed people, I can’t both slack off and get paid.

Yeah. Both of my sisters happily played with it just because it was there. And no, I don’t mean the pink-on-pink stuff that was introduced later (Paradisa, Belville).

Also, commas are important people!

Should be: commas are important, people! (They’re not important people.)

That’s exactly my point. I quoted the joke in response to Nerd’s consistent lack of a comma in such situations (in this case “You lose loser”), which is sometimes confusing (and always sounds wrong).

The joke isn’t original, I saw it on Facebook a few days ago.

But there is no similar pressure to become more intelligent.

Or less intelligent for that matter!

For example, Australian Aborigines have particularly good levels of visual memory

Assuming you have a reference for that that doesn’t say “the difference wasn’t statistically significant”:
Are you sure that isn’t cultural? Depending on your lifestyle, you might be training your visual memory from early childhood. I’m told people in China have impressive visual memory because that’s what literacy in China is.

some kids tease her because she’s small. I suspect that they’re frankly jealous because they don’t have anything besides being older and taller.

…That figure near the top… there’s an arrow from “Genes” to “General intelligence (g)”, which is marked “Heritability 0.4–0.8”. So, first, the number isn’t known to within less than a factor of two; second, 0.4 at least is pretty low. There’s also an arrow from “Grey matter” to g, marked “Correlation 0.33” and “Genetic correlation 0.25”. A correlation of a third is trash, and a correlation of a quarter is mockery.

In short, the data presented by that blog post don’t support its conclusions!

Hirschforschung

*giggle* That would be “deer research”. :-) “Brain research” is Hirnforschung.

A google scholar search of the results reveals that the 1987 paper has been cited 16 times in the literature

:-o Wow, that’s pathetic. The Journal of Anatomy is a major-league paper; you’d expect a paper there (especially a paper about humans!) to be cited closer to 16 times a month than 16 times in 27 years!!!

and the only cites that refer to any differences between Australians and Caucasians were from the same group.

That’s damning.

I can find no evidence that the researchers were blinded to which sample they had. BIG problem. In fact, that alone essentially invalidates the study, unless I simply missed the bit where they talked about blinding or they forgot to mention it in the article.

Apologies for not using the HTML tags for quoting. I’ll try to use them in future :)

@ Dianne & originalantigenicsin,

Thanks for the comments. In terms of the results being confirmed or further research with MRI I understand one of the authors – University of Sydney pathology Professor Clive Harper (who has been quoted with the 25% figure) indicated that it was unlikely there was much appetite for that line of research. I see he’s now retired, but still has his email on the faculty website so I may see if he can comment further.

I can’t track down a full version of the 1994 paper which is referred to here by Holloway et al.

The simplest explanation would be that these are shared characteristics. If so, this would indicate that the earliest hominid ancestor also displayed a similar morphology. More directly, however, it is well appreciated that the amount of PVC found in modern humans is variable (Gilissen et al., 1995; Gilissen and Zilles, 1995, 1996), suggesting that the ontogenetic development of the PVC varies within the human species. In addition, there is strong evidence that the volume of PVC is significantly larger in Australian aborigines than in Europeans (Klekamp et al., 1994). These two findings show that there is neurogenetic variability in the amount of PVC that modern humans display, indicating that this feature is an ancient feature of the hominid brain relative to more derived cortical structures.

What changes in public policy do you suggest based on this?
How should we alter funding based on your premise? University policy? Hiring practices?
You’re in charge of the world, Max, and you believe some groups of people are just inherently smarter than others. You’re hiring, and you’ve got a group of applicants from a lot of different ethnic groups applying. What do you do?

@ Anri,

Any average group differences are statistical – they don’t imply a huge amount about individuals. So I don’t suggest you make public policy changes (assuming group differences are due in part to both genetic as well as environmental variation).

I have not been able to find the second Klekamp article either, but Google Scholar indicates that it has been cited a total of 4 times. This is suggestive that there hasn’t been further work because the results are not very interesting, rather than because they are controversial or “not what people want to hear”. Controversial articles generate a lot of argument. Articles with no statistical significance tend to simply disappear. Again, the evidence is becoming less, not more, convincing the more one looks at it.

Any average group differences are statistical – they don’t imply a huge amount about individuals. So I don’t suggest you make public policy changes (assuming group differences are due in part to both genetic as well as environmental variation).

I’m not just talking about individuals – what policy changes would you make towards groups?
How would you view, for example, competitive bids between a company largely composed of superior people and one composed of inferior people? Should they be given equal weight?
How about populations? When relocating your company, what percentage of inferior people would get you to reduce your interest in a place?

In other words, at what level do you consider your argument to actually say something meaningful about people?
Apparently not the individual – that’s fine. So what’s the threshold?